My name is Nona Tickner and I live in Merritt in the Nicola Valley. I move here from Victoria in 1993 intending to stay for a year or two. I come to love and appreciate the rural lifestyle and attitude and feel that my best interests, in fact the best interests of communities like Merritt is best represented by belonging to a voting region made up of similar communities. My voice is heard and represented.

I fully support the Electoral Boundaries Commission's recommended changes to both Hope and Princeton as outlined in the Preliminary Report.

The Report puts Hope/other communities in the Fraser Canyon back where they belong--with other rural communities in the Cariboo-Thompson Region such as Merritt, Ashcroft, Lillooet and Logan Lake. This change will result in more “effective representation” for the residents of the Hope area by including them with communities with similar realities and interests. In the past, having Hope in with an urban centre like Chilliwack would be like putting Keremeos or Oliver in with the much larger City of Penticton – their voices would be drowned out. Moving Hope into Fraser-Nicola has allowed you to move Princeton into Boundary-Similkameen in order fix the population deviation problem in my electoral district. Princeton’s will continue to share commonalities or “community interests with the other small, rural communities in Boundary-Similkameen as it did in Fraser-Nicola. No community is large enough to dominate the others.

The changes recommended in your Preliminary Report also fixes the problem that was introduced in 2009 when different Aboriginal communities of the same N’laka pamux Nation were split into two districts when Hope and the Fraser Canyon were separated from Yale-Lillooet. Now, all 20 Indian Bands of the N”laka pamux Tribe situated in Canada are, once again, housed within Fraser-Nicola. The Aboriginal people in the Fraser Canyon and in the Reserves surrounding Hope were not consulted in 2009 when those changes were made to take Hope out of Yale-Lillooet.

Now that Hope and Yale have, once again, been re-united with Fraser-Nicola it is important that the constituency ought to be called by its historic name of “Yale-Lillooet”.